The present invention relates to apparatus for monitoring the performance of selective heating and cooling apparatus.
Apparatus for monitoring the operation of a heating system is disclosed in my copending application Ser. No. 950787 filed Oct. 12, 1978, entitled "Heat Meters". While such apparatus can be adapted to serve in a cooling system, as disclosed it is constructed to serve in one capacity only.
Some room-conditioning systems use circulating water or other liquid to provide heating or cooling effect in a room heat-exchanger, from a remote heating unit or a remote cooling unit. The present invention provides apparatus including separate "heat" and "cool" registers, common computing means, and selective switching means, organized for separately and selectively enabling the registers to monitor the delivered heating and cooling energy. The computer includes fluid temperature sensors at the inlet and outlet, respectively, of a room heat-exchanger, which also constitute the outlet and inlet fluid temperature sensors of heating and cooling equipment in a circulating-liquid system that supplies the room heat exchanger.
The preferred form of temperature sensors are polarized, and when the system operation is changed over from cooling to heating or the reverse, connection of the sensors in the remainder of the computer is reversed in coordination with selection of the appropriate "heat" or "cool" register.
It would be feasible to execute the various switching changes in the computer manually in coordination with changes in the system controls to cause heating or cooling operation. However, as a distinctive feature of the invention the switching is responsive to the temperature sensors and is thus automatically responsive to changes in system operation.
The amount of energy per unit volume of heated or cooled water or other fluid that is metered will vary with the fluid temperature, and the accuracy of the fluid meter also changes as a function of temperature as more fully discussed in my copending application on "Heat Meters" mentioned above. The fluid-flow meter is located at the return from the room heat exchanger where the temperature change between heating and cooling operation of the system is small, compared with the much wider temperature range at the inlet to the room heat exchanger. Still further, the computer here incorporates means for introducing correction for temperature-related error in metering of the fluid. The corrective means includes a temperature sensor in or near the flow meter, in any of the ways disclosed in my "Heat Meter" application which is incorporated here by reference.
The nature of the invention including the foregoing novel features and their advantages will be more fully appreciated from the following detailed description of the illustrative embodiment shown in the accompanying drawings.